The panel found that now-retired Superior Court Judge Patrick J. Roma erred in allowing "hearsay and prejudicial" testimony from friends and a counselor of the 44-year-old victim, Jody Ann Scharf.

Stephen Scharf, imprisoned since 2008, must now be retried in Bergen County Superior Court, the panel ruled.

Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Jody Ann's Scharf's lifeless body was found at the bottom of the Englewood cliffs on the night of Sept. 20, 1992. Her husband told police she had fallen from a rock on the edge of the Rockefeller Lookout after they had consumed alcohol. Scharf told police he had gone to fetch a blanket and some wine from the car when he saw his wife attempt to stand. Instead, she fell forward and plunged 120 feet to her death, he told police.

In 2011, a jury found Scharf guilty of the murder of his wife, a conviction the appellate panel maintained was based partially on statements that should not have been admitted into the record.

The case was cold for nearly 20 years until prosecutors in 2008 reanalyzed the evidence and concluded the height of the cliff, the location of her body and the acceleration of the fall pointed to homicide. The death had previously been ruled accidental.

Lawyers for the prosecution argued Jody Ann had expressed to friends and a counselor that she lived in fear of her husband––who she was in the process of divorcing––and would not have been alone with him at the lookout, particularly since she was scared of heights.

The appellate panel argued those statements of fear should have been stricken from the record.

"The statements were not relevant because Scharf's state of mind was not an issue in the case," the panel wrote. "Her alleged fear did not keep her from spending time with defendant, as the parties' son testified that his parents had gone to dinner with him the night before her death and that the night that she died she told him they planned to go to a comedy club in New York City. In other words, her state of mind was not relevant to her conduct. Scharf's fears were not a motive for defendant to kill his wife, nor were they admissible to prove something about his state of mind and future conduct.

"Contrary to the trial judge's view, Scharf's fear of defendant, even if based on their past history, simply does not make it more or less likely that, once having gone to the Englewood Cliffs with defendant, while she was under the influence of alcohol, an accident could not have occurred. There is no reason that the victim's fear of defendant would have made it less likely that an accident occurred."

The panel found that the state's evidence "was by no means overwhelming, and we find that the error in this case was of such a nature as to have been clearly capable of producing an unjust result."